Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

With a new show on Netflix based on her James Beard Award-winning book of the same name, it’s safe to say that Samin Nosrat is taking over the culinary world. The author of "Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking" and the writer of a column in New York Times Magazine, Nosrat knows food – and she knows how to write and talk about it.

USA TODAY caught up with the chef, author and writer to talk about everything from half-and-half and her favorite podcasts to the joy of cooking vegetables and the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people.

Question: What’s your coffee order?

Nosrat: I just drink regular drip coffee, but I’m kind of a coffee baby. I put a lot of half and half in it to the point where, if I have to ask someone else to get the coffee for me, I’m like ‘you have to put more half-and-half than you ever think anybody would ever want.’ The visual cue that I use is that it should look like Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream.

Q: What’s the last book you read?

Nosrat: I’m feeling very exerted in many ways, so I’m trying to give myself easy reading and easy TV consumption, so I actually bought “To All the Boys I Loved Before” by Jenny Han, the young-adult novel that the movie is based on.

Q: What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done?

Nosrat: For sure making this series. When we first announced the show, it was at this industry event where there was a press junket, and I went into TV Guide, which was one of the places that took my photo. They were like, ‘how are you today?’ I don’t know about you, but I grew up reading TV Guide. I did not grow up thinking one day I would be in it. I just cannot believe that I get to do this amazing project.

• I love “Forever 35” – it basically is like a beauty podcast by two people who are not experts. It’s like bubblegum.

• I love “Longform,” which is an interview podcast with writers. I feel like I’ve learned so much about writing and storytelling by listening.

• I love “Song Exploder,” which is a podcast about the process and the story behind a song. I listen to every one and sometimes it’s about a song or a musician that I’m familiar with and really like and other times it’s somebody I’ve never heard before, but the interviewing is so incredible that I always learn something.

• I also love “Still Processing,” and it may be my all-time favorite. It’s two culture writers from the New York Times. They are so smart and they have this incredible way of connecting the dots between big and little things in the world. Again, from listening to them I’ve learned a lot about how to be a better storyteller.

Music:

• California Honeydrops. We put a song in the show, which made me so happy. They’re one of my favorite local bands. They’re really vibrant and fun, and what I listen to if I need to up the energy vibe.

• This is super random – the beauty of Spotify is how you discover things you probably never would have heard about. There’s this band called Khruangbin, and it’s Thai surf music. It’s just really groovy feeling.

• I made all these cooking playlists, all the different vibes of cooking: when you are angry, when you are happy, when you are heartbroken. Another musician I love Kasey Johansing, she has this amazing honey voice. I love some old-timey Van Morrison. I love Stevie Wonder – he’s probably my all-time favorite. I love Nina Simone.

Samin Nosrat is a chef and award-winning author of the book "Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking," which now has its own show on Netflix.(Photo: Handout)

Q: Who’s been your biggest mentor?

Nosrat: I’m gonna be a little subversive here. I don’t feel like I can give one single answer to that because I feel like one of the things that is unique about the way I work in the world is that I exist in a bunch of different worlds, a bunch of different industries and landscapes. I’m just a deeply curious person, and so I feel very lucky that I have a career in cooking, and a career in writing, and now I have a career in making television.

I feel like there have been different people I have looked to in each of those fields who have been so impactful for me. Michael Pollan is absolutely my writing mentor – he has been so generous with me throughout my career. My cooking mentor is a chef named Christopher Lee, who really sort of took me under his wing and protected me and gave me so many opportunities throughout my cooking career. Who’s my mentor in this new world? I don’t even know – I’m still looking.

Q: What does your career path look like?

Nosrat: There’s this amazing Steve Jobs anecdote. He gave the story in a commencement speech about how you can only connect the dots when you look backward, but looking forward, you know, as you’re trying to plan your career or your life, there’s not really a very clear way to be able to predict what’s going to happen. I think that is very applicable for me, certainly from where I sit now looking back, and as I figure out what’s next. Because people will come up to me and say, just in conversation, if I’m meeting somebody, 'what do you do?' And sometimes I say I’m a cook, sometimes I say I’m a writer. They always want to know, ‘how many books have you written?’ or ‘what restaurant do you work at?’ and I don’t always have a traditional answer to those questions. At first I struggled a lot with not getting into any normal idea of somebody else’s version of being a cook or being a writer, and now I think of it as an amazing strength. For me, it all sort of comes together around storytelling.

Originally, I wanted to be a poet. I really went to college and was an English major thinking I would go to poetry school and be that kind of storyteller. Then, I fell into cooking and sort of realized that I might need to make some money to support my poetry habit. Cooking became this amazing part of my life and probably for 10 years, I just cooked and put all of my time and energy into becoming a better cook for the sake of trying to master this skill. At some point, cooking became less about food than it did about the people around the table, the people who grew the food, the people who make the food. I realized that cooking and food were just another medium for me to tell stories, and so that was kind of a really wonderful way to bring my two loves of writing and cooking together. That sort of set the path for me to start really writing about food, first in magazines and newspapers and then eventually in a book. Now I have the incredible privilege of having this column in the New York Times Magazine that is both my greatest pleasure and my greatest pain, to write this thing every month. So that feels really wonderful and then that turned into the amazing opportunity to tell stories, ultimately about people but while talking about food, in this new medium of film and of TV. I feel, again, so lucky. For me, there is this theme of storytelling that so clearly ties it all together.

Nosrat: I’m definitely riding a tidal wave of a high right now with this show, and this is an amazing thing. But, I think for me what may have even been more meaningful – because it was something that I really just wanted to do since I was a little kid – was writing and publishing my book. I think that getting that book done and getting it out in the world – if I had to rank the experiences that one might be a little bit more meaningful, you know.

Low: There have been so many to choose from, but let’s pick. I’ll just give you a list:

• There were two book deals I bungled before I got mine, and in retrospect those were books I was not meant to write. At the time, it felt very heartbreaking.

• I applied twice for a Fulbright grant: the first time I was the first alternate, and the second time I didn’t even make it past the first round.

• I ran a restaurant for five years that was almost the entire time financially failing, and ultimately we closed it in 2009 because we couldn’t make the numbers work. I wasn’t that happy doing that job, I wasn’t prepared to be a manager – just because you’re a good cook doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good manager – and I was really young, and not really properly given the training or support to be a good manager. So, I was unhappy and stressed out and feeling the burden of a restaurant – in which I was not an owner or a partner – but, I felt like it was mine. The stress of that for a long time, and the biggest low was, in those years, when I was mean to people because I didn’t know another way to be a leader to get what I wanted out of them. I think that the thing I learned from that was that, A: I needed to go to therapy and deal with my temper, and figure out, how do I make better decisions to put myself in situations where I’m going to be able to use the skills and the tools I’m working on developing to communicate better with people? Looking back, the thing I feel the most regret and pain over is that I didn’t treat everyone that I worked with (with) total respect and kindness.

Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned throughout your career?

Nosrat: No matter what I do, no matter what industry I’m in, no matter what project I’m working on, my rule – my die-hard rule – is that the people you surround yourself with are everything. For me, I want to be around creative, vulnerable, transparent, communicative, empathetic people. Of course we’re all flawed, of course we’re not always our best selves, but I think making the choices to work with people who will work their butts off, who will give everything they have, who care and who are nice to each other, even in really tricky situations, is to me what determines my joy or happiness in a particular project or situation more than anything else – more than what we accomplish or don’t accomplish.

Q: What’s your favorite dish to make?

Nosrat: My favorite dish to make is any sort of dish that involves multiple vegetables. I love vegetables so much. I love being fed vegetables. I think that it’s an act of care for somebody to feed me vegetables, it’s an act of self-care for me to eat them. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s where every children’s television show was about how, like, ‘ew! I don’t want to eat my brussels sprouts!’ It was just a gag, right? Like, ‘don’t eat your broccoli.’

There’s a way where I sort of very much absorbed that narrative that vegetables were gross, and it wasn’t until I became a cook – and my mom, I will say, is an amazing cook. It’s just that in Persian cooking, which is what I grew up eating, we primarily ate greens and herbs rather than cooked vegetables that you do a lot in Western cooking – so, for me, when I learned how to properly cook and season a beet (I thought I always hated beets) or I cooked asparagus until it was crisp and green and delicious in salted water that allowed the salt to go in and fully season the thing through. Any vegetable to bring the best out of it is my greatest joy, so feeding people vegetables where I think they might assume they’re going to be underwhelmed or maybe being sent something that they don’t want to eat or they don’t like, and then surprising them? That gives me so much joy. Usually I put a salsa, some nuts and some cheeses on top and some herbs to make it delicious. I’m just like, vegetables are my everything!

Q: What advice would you give to someone who follow in your footsteps?

Nosrat: You have to build up a resistance, like an immunity, to failure. It’s a really big part of both being a cook and being a writer. You’re going to burn stuff, you’re going to ruin things, you’re going to add too much salt, you’re going to undercook that chicken and bring it to the table and embarrass yourself – it always happens. And, yet, the beautiful thing about is cooking is, there’s always tomorrow. There’s always another opportunity to eat. Practice is everything in cooking. Nobody is born knowing how to be a great chef – it’s all through practice and hard work.

The exact same thing is applicable in writing. One of my favorite quotes about writing is from Gustave Flaubert. He said, “prose is like hair; it shines with combing.” Nothing that I say or write or think comes out perfectly the first time, and usually the biggest part of writing for me is revising. I have to revise stuff an untold number of times to get it to be good, and I think there’s a way where when people only see your unfinished product, they assume, ‘you whipped that cooking right up!’ or ‘you whipped that article right up!’ but a lot of work goes into it. I did maybe whip up that roast cauliflower, but you know what came before that was 17 years of practice.

Be ready to fail, and get up and try again. And practice, practice, practice, no matter what you’re doing.